Amazon’s Cashierless Store Is Almost Ready for Prime Time
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
There still seem to be many of the issues people brought up a year ago, such as how this depends on the presence of a phone with the appropriate app installed, or what happens with groups of people in which only one person has the app (such as with kids).
More to the point, I can see how this would be better for Amazon, but I'm not sure it's better for most shoppers. Amazon gets to charge people who graze on produce while in the store, and kids who consume snacks in the store, and can presumably produce video evidence when customers throw a fit. But they can also overcharge me for things and how am I supposed to know that? Check the app in the parking lot to make sure I have everything it charged me for? What recourse do I have if not? What if something wasn't charged as marked on the shelf? I've already paid at that point. I've gone through this enough times with stores high-end and low-end to know it's inevitable for Amazon.
The leverage is all Amazon's, and the convenience doesn't offset that for me. I know I'm not alone, but maybe there aren't enough like me to dent their ambitions.
I often try to predict the value of the items in the shopping cart when waiting in the cashier queue. Most of the time shopping in a supermarket, I can predict the total sum in a range of +/- 2 Euros. My girlfriend? Perhaps in a range of +/- 5 Euros. My mother? She would only be irritated if the sum is at least 10 Euros above what she expected. And that is for 15-25 items and a total sum in the range of 40-60 Euros. But there is no way my mother, my girlfriend or even I would detect small over- or undercharging most of the time.
My local supermarket has some specials which are loyalty card only, so when the item is scanned the full price shows up. I use this to determine when to use the loyalty card for minimum tracking, minimum time, and minimum price (it doesn't have my personal info associated with it, but still connects purchases and it's faster to skip).
This is hugely beneficial to individual shoppers. Lining up is such a PITA. Walk in / walk out would be awesome.
They should just have a rule that kids aren't allowed to come along. I can tell you that rule alone will have a zillion mothers crying out in gratitude.
Children could get a military ID at age 10.
So up until 10 I sat outside the PX waiting for her to finish shopping.
(Getting the ID was great, we could get on the base by ourselves with them. We'd ride our bikes out to the Air Force base and hang out near the runway, watching the F-104's take off. Seeing (and hearing) a squadron of them lift off was incredible. Sadly, I had to surrender the ID at 21.)
Oh, my phone is out of batteries. Guess I'll just give up and head home.
Oops, looks like a hurricane/forest fire/proletarian uprising has knocked out local infrastructure. (Luckily, this almost never happens anymore!) Man, it would be great if we had a medium of exchange that would work under these adverse conditions. Guess I'll just barter my Harry's razors and other hipster goods to get some formula for my baby!
Also, taking out $100 in 2017 is silly, at least if you spend more than $200 a week, which is most non-students here. I just get out the max that the ATM will let me have and I never regret it.
"But what if I get mugged?" This is silly. If you actually do get mugged, you want to have a big load of money on you, not $3.29. Happy muggers mean fewer dead programmers.
If you're working with euros your largest denomination coin is 2€ . In Yen it's 500 yen! This is not chump change and just throwing those coins into the charity box can leave you with effectively increasing your lunch pricing by 50% if you have a "give all coins to charity" policy.
If you have the cash for it more power to you, of course.
That works even when coins have non-trivial value.
500 yen's over £3, so I'm guessing you don't get many of those in your lunch change? The top result for "how much is lunch in Japan" [1] suggests that your 500 yen coin would just about cover the next day's lunch and is lighter (barely; 7 grams versus 8.75g) than a British one pound coin [2,3].
The coin sorting machines that you might tip a coin jar into take a decent chunk of your money for the privilege of counting it (e.g. CoinStar charge 9.9% [4]).
1: https://www.withhusbandintow.com/costs-to-eat-in-japan/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_pound_(British_coin)
Most of the rest of the world seems to have lighter coins and more smaller note denominations, which is way more convenient.
Sounds awfully inconvenient. I'm constantly having to travel to the bank to get more cash, it's easy to lose, steal and destroy, the money I get in change might be counterfeit, it takes a lot more effort to track my cash purchases, and it turns out banks charge merchants a fee for handling cash too! (a local example of a fee schedule: https://www.oregonstatecu.com/business#/tab/fees)
Perhaps this all is a cost some feel is worth paying in exchange for privacy, but a cost nonetheless.
Also, you go to the bank to get cash? This may vary by geographic region, but where I live (NYC) there's I'm rarely near a place that doesn't have an ATM within a hundred feet or so.
Guess money could be counterfeit. But I've never encountered counterfeit bills, at least that I know of or that has inconvenienced me, and I haven't heard of it as a problem among the people I know who run cash-heavy businesses (mostly restaurants). Identity theft, however, is an epidemic, and has happened to literally everyone I know, except for (some) of the kids below the age of 14. Some of these cases can take years to clean up, and they often start with using plastic at a big chain, like Target or Home Depot.
Cards are nice for big purchases, like appliances or a large dinner out, or when shopping online . But cash is the thing.
Have any of these ever happened in your adult life? If so, how often?
This made me giggle. I've tried to figure out the same thing myself when shopping with a significant other or close friend. I'm having a hard time imagining how this would be cast as an engineering problem.
I really wish Amazon would let me put dry and frozen goods in an app, then have kiva robots fetch those while I just browse produce. Like, you could leave the produce section normal, people freak about produce, but make the rest of the store a robot filled warehouse that customers don't even enter.
But people also spend more money when it's easy to do so, and when they aren't frustrated by the process. How many trips to the store aren't even happening because it's an ordeal?
Malls are playing the strategy of keeping people in store, while the internet is lowering barriers to the experience.
Malls are dying and the internet is winning. There are a lot of reasons, but 'make it easier for customers to give you money' is probably not an awful business model.
Hold on - "shelf sensors"? Wasn't Amazon originally advertising this as being purely camera-based, and that was why everyone was so skeptical it could ever work sufficiently well? 'Shelf sensors' could cover a heck of a lot short of embedding individual RFID sensors...
For e-commerce, the total for the entire three-month quarter was $115.3 billion.
I wonder if I would be allowed to grocery shop as I do now, with my adult daughter who doesn't have an Amazon account of her own.
From the article:
"Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester. "
It links to an account on your phone. You're under full surveillance while in the store.
To go any further down the premise you're suggesting, you're already getting to traditional methods of walking into a store, stealing merchandise, and then running for it.
The Pikachu example, I'd argue is even easier than people wearing regular clothing due to the fact that it's unusual.
It's true that human surveillance can help a lot, but if that's the case you might as well just get cashiers , who double as stockers who are necessary anyways.
I'm less concerned about stealing and more interested whether this would be cheaper or a better experience than just having cashiers. Is EBT accepted for example? Can a grocery store not accept EBT? Can EBT even be accepted online? Etc.
If it ends up working how you describe it sounds like a terrible experience in cold areas where people regularly take off multiple layers of clothing, including but not limited to face masks, gloves, sweaters, coats, etc.
Also, in terms of gaming the system, it doesn't need to be "gamed", it just needs to allow you to walk out with items easily. People already shoplift easily, the question is whether it will be easier with this new system. Presumably the purpose of this is to be both easier for the customer and cheaper for Amazon compared to have cashiers.
Okay, so 3 employees tested it? This tech is going to be "tested" in the real world by tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first few months/year. Something tells me things will go far from smoothly.
I've only had an experience with a "semi-cashierless" store, sort of speak, where the cashier would scan your stuff, and then it would give you a ticket, and you'd go to pay with it at a not-so-intuitive machine. Oh, and you also had to scan it again before you left the area at the designated exit-gate.
Let me tell you, it felt like both a more frustrating experience than just paying the cashier and it took longer time. The only thing this did is save the cashier 15 seconds per person, while the store paid for a dozen of those machines who knows what.
So we'll see if this is indeed a better experience, or it's just meant to save Amazon money on not having to pay for cashiers, while giving customers a more frustrating experience and making them spend more time in the store to register every item (for the same number of purchased items).
Apple's Face ID can't even identify your own face 100% of the time. How is Amazon's tech going to identify (from a distance) millions of people that pass through the store and every item they got with 100% accuracy??